This disclosure relates generally to presentation of content by an online system, and more specifically to determining a prompt to perform an action presented to an online system user along with video content.
An online system, such as a social networking system, allows its users to connect to and communicate with other online system users. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of online systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by online systems, an online system provides an ideal forum for entities, such as retailers or service providers, to increase awareness about products or services by presenting content to online system users.
Presenting content items to online system users allows an entity (e.g., a retailer, a service provider, a restaurant) to gain public attention for products or services or to persuade online users to take an action regarding the entity's products or services. Additionally, many online systems generate revenue by receiving compensation from entities for presenting certain content items to their users. Frequently, online systems charge an entity for each presentation of certain types of content items to an online system user (e.g., each “impression” of the content item) or for each interaction with certain types of content items by an online system user.
To provide additional information about products or services, an entity may include video data in a content item to be presented by an online system. Frequently, a prompt to perform an action is presented along with the video data to provoke a user viewing the video data to perform the prompted action. For example, a prompt to retrieve additional information about a product described by the video data is presented along with the video data. Conventionally, an entity specifies a prompt to perform an action when generating the content item including the video data, so the same prompt is presented to each user presented with the video data. However, different users may have different likelihoods of performing different types of actions, so users unlikely to perform the action identified by the prompt presented with the video data, but likely to perform a different type of action based on the video data, will not perform the action identified by the prompt.